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Lot Essay
Known for his monumental depictions of childhood toys and meticulous portrayals of popular culture, Jeff Koons is often regarded as one of the most influential and provocative artists in the world today. Created during a pivotal year for the artist when he rose to international acclaim, Vase of Flowers is a confluence of the artist’s interest in communicative power of the Baroque and his exploration of themes such as taste and class. By melding a traditionally decorative material with his knowledge of art history and art market politics, Koons successfully executes a work that both literally and figuratively reflects contemporary society.
Bearing a striking resemblance to the densely-packed floral arrangements of Vincent van Gogh (such as Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, 1888), Koons’s mirrored ikebana bursts with a variety of blooms from a modestly decorated pot. Each petal, leaf, stamen, and stalk are rendered with precision in beveled mirrored glass and read like a reflective paint-by-number waiting to be filled.
As the viewer passes in front of this work in glass, their multi-faceted countenance ripples in every silvery pane. Various versions of the outside world flit through the work, creating a constant energy within its crystalline structure. This mosaic fits together like so many puzzle pieces to form a subtly confrontational composition. Recalling the decorative mirrors of years past, this work is at odds with its intended use. Foregrounding its decorative qualities over utilitarian practicality, one cannot catch a full reflection in its surface. Koons’s floral arrangement incites a new reading by placing form over function.
This example was included in the 2014 exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, which was mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art and marked the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in New York. The elaborate installations and media blitz surrounding such a momentous occasion were amplified by the fact that this was also the final show in the museum’s Marcel Breuer designed building before their move to Chelsea. Chronicling Koons’s oeuvre from 1978 until the present day, nearly every available space was filled with almost 150 works that truly illustrated the range and diversity of the artist’s output over the years. After its blockbuster reception in New York, the exhibition traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Part of his Banality series, which showed simultaneously at three galleries upon its initial exhibition, Vase of Flowers is an archetypal Koons work in that it draws both from areas of contemporary pop culture and historical practice. “In the Banality work, I started to be really specific about what my interests were. Everything here is a metaphor for the viewer’s cultural guilt and shame. Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment, or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there is one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is--it is absolute perfection. Banality is the embracement of that” (J. Koons, quoted in H. Werner Holzwarth (ed.), Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2009, p. 252). This dichotomy between the highbrow art world and the generally commonplace subjects from which Koons borrows places his work in a sort of limbo that creates an uneasy tension between mass culture and the instilled preciousness of original art objects. This kind of exquisite manufacturing of beautifully banal objects spoke to the society of the late 1980s (and continues through to today), one that was obsessed with image and presentation. But Koons has something deeper in mind. Although some of the artist’s works may look like one-liners, they actually show an intricate understanding of the history of art.
In the overarching series of which Vase of Flowers belongs, Koons constructed works in mirror, polychromed wood, and porcelain, all elements hinting at the sumptuousness of the Rococo. By consciously drawing upon the more decorative elements of this 18th century French movement, Koons inserts himself into the conversation surrounding the lavish excess and its replacement by the more serious and relatively dour Neoclassical movement that followed. Where Rococo artists like François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard constructed saccharine scenes of ruddy-faced cherubs and young lovers amongst the flowers, Koons takes the material ethos of these artists and infuses it with contemporary culture. Whether translating gold and porcelain into a statue of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey (Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988) or rendering a scene in mirror that looks straight from a Hummel figurine catalogue (Little Girl, 1988), Koons rounds up pop culture and filters it through historical guises. “The Rococo may have been the first metadiscourse in art, in which art is understood as a self-conscious illusion and in which aesthetic appreciation is grounded in the awareness of artifice” (D. Salvioni, “Jeff Koons’s Poetics of Class”, Jeff Koons, San Francisco 1992, p.22). Koons, like the artists of the Rococo, is aware of how beautiful and appealing his work is to the audience. It is this delicate line the artist walks between expert craftsmanship and conceptual conceit that makes his pieces so enticing. Even Vase of Flowers reminiscence to the compositions of Van Gogh, one of the most popular of the Post-Impressionists (having long been co-opted by commercial culture in the vein of the Mona Lisa), is a careful tactic by Koons to balance the two competing sides of his practice.
Vase of Flowers is indicative of a motif present throughout Koons’s oeuvre, that of flowers. From his enormous Tulips (1995-2004), stainless steel replicas of balloon flowers, to the monumental topiary of a West Highland White Terrier entitled Puppy (1992), Koons has a continued fascination with the inclusion of flora in his work. “I have always enjoyed flowers,” he noted, “Since taking art lessons as a child, I have had flowers in my work. I always like the sense that a flower just displays itself. The viewer always finds grace in a flower. Flowers are a symbol that life goes forward” (J. Koons quoted in M. Codognato & E. Geuna (ed.), Jeff Koons, exh.cat., Naples, 2003, p. 157).
Bearing a striking resemblance to the densely-packed floral arrangements of Vincent van Gogh (such as Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, 1888), Koons’s mirrored ikebana bursts with a variety of blooms from a modestly decorated pot. Each petal, leaf, stamen, and stalk are rendered with precision in beveled mirrored glass and read like a reflective paint-by-number waiting to be filled.
As the viewer passes in front of this work in glass, their multi-faceted countenance ripples in every silvery pane. Various versions of the outside world flit through the work, creating a constant energy within its crystalline structure. This mosaic fits together like so many puzzle pieces to form a subtly confrontational composition. Recalling the decorative mirrors of years past, this work is at odds with its intended use. Foregrounding its decorative qualities over utilitarian practicality, one cannot catch a full reflection in its surface. Koons’s floral arrangement incites a new reading by placing form over function.
This example was included in the 2014 exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, which was mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art and marked the first large-scale exhibition of the artist’s work in New York. The elaborate installations and media blitz surrounding such a momentous occasion were amplified by the fact that this was also the final show in the museum’s Marcel Breuer designed building before their move to Chelsea. Chronicling Koons’s oeuvre from 1978 until the present day, nearly every available space was filled with almost 150 works that truly illustrated the range and diversity of the artist’s output over the years. After its blockbuster reception in New York, the exhibition traveled to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Part of his Banality series, which showed simultaneously at three galleries upon its initial exhibition, Vase of Flowers is an archetypal Koons work in that it draws both from areas of contemporary pop culture and historical practice. “In the Banality work, I started to be really specific about what my interests were. Everything here is a metaphor for the viewer’s cultural guilt and shame. Art can be a horrible discriminator. It can be used either to be uplifting and to give self-empowerment, or to debase people and disempower them. And on the tightrope in between, there is one’s cultural history. These images are aspects from my own, but everybody’s cultural history is perfect, it can’t be anything other than what it is--it is absolute perfection. Banality is the embracement of that” (J. Koons, quoted in H. Werner Holzwarth (ed.), Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2009, p. 252). This dichotomy between the highbrow art world and the generally commonplace subjects from which Koons borrows places his work in a sort of limbo that creates an uneasy tension between mass culture and the instilled preciousness of original art objects. This kind of exquisite manufacturing of beautifully banal objects spoke to the society of the late 1980s (and continues through to today), one that was obsessed with image and presentation. But Koons has something deeper in mind. Although some of the artist’s works may look like one-liners, they actually show an intricate understanding of the history of art.
In the overarching series of which Vase of Flowers belongs, Koons constructed works in mirror, polychromed wood, and porcelain, all elements hinting at the sumptuousness of the Rococo. By consciously drawing upon the more decorative elements of this 18th century French movement, Koons inserts himself into the conversation surrounding the lavish excess and its replacement by the more serious and relatively dour Neoclassical movement that followed. Where Rococo artists like François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard constructed saccharine scenes of ruddy-faced cherubs and young lovers amongst the flowers, Koons takes the material ethos of these artists and infuses it with contemporary culture. Whether translating gold and porcelain into a statue of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey (Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988) or rendering a scene in mirror that looks straight from a Hummel figurine catalogue (Little Girl, 1988), Koons rounds up pop culture and filters it through historical guises. “The Rococo may have been the first metadiscourse in art, in which art is understood as a self-conscious illusion and in which aesthetic appreciation is grounded in the awareness of artifice” (D. Salvioni, “Jeff Koons’s Poetics of Class”, Jeff Koons, San Francisco 1992, p.22). Koons, like the artists of the Rococo, is aware of how beautiful and appealing his work is to the audience. It is this delicate line the artist walks between expert craftsmanship and conceptual conceit that makes his pieces so enticing. Even Vase of Flowers reminiscence to the compositions of Van Gogh, one of the most popular of the Post-Impressionists (having long been co-opted by commercial culture in the vein of the Mona Lisa), is a careful tactic by Koons to balance the two competing sides of his practice.
Vase of Flowers is indicative of a motif present throughout Koons’s oeuvre, that of flowers. From his enormous Tulips (1995-2004), stainless steel replicas of balloon flowers, to the monumental topiary of a West Highland White Terrier entitled Puppy (1992), Koons has a continued fascination with the inclusion of flora in his work. “I have always enjoyed flowers,” he noted, “Since taking art lessons as a child, I have had flowers in my work. I always like the sense that a flower just displays itself. The viewer always finds grace in a flower. Flowers are a symbol that life goes forward” (J. Koons quoted in M. Codognato & E. Geuna (ed.), Jeff Koons, exh.cat., Naples, 2003, p. 157).